Dérangé

Set to pulse, the sun observes the slow mysteries
that swathe the zenith possessed.
I know up above. The bitter that is to slash the veins
to with a gaze harvest the incense, the signs,
the colourless language of the harps and the sound and the fingers,
the dreams of the roses as they rise from the skin.

The exquisite serpent.

Of lips are the texts as scimitars.

Simply peel open the birch through the long fissure of colour,
as if the spectacle were an embryo,
an oxymoron.

An all-embracing circuit warms through the light bulb.

A swimming pool of incandescent tungsten.

Give me the tenderness of the steel in blood-red milk
to mould the eternal corpses,
had I a ladle shell.

The volcano,
the magma.

It knows how to soften in tongues, the fire
that the wind stirs that stirs the water
that the water washes that the body weaves
that maddens as the tall brain
meekly eats the delinquent dream.1

Give me the odd hours for the void silence,
the purple drawing,
the forgetting on mid-desert.

That I walk across the dunes, the fine sand,
amidst the clouds.

1"The tall brain meekly eats the delinquent dream" was the random product of a collaborative Exquisite Corpse writing game conducted on the Poetry Feedback and Discussion forum.